Stereoscopic images, e.g., 3D images, are growing in popularity. In the case of stereoscopic images each image normally corresponds to a pair of frames, e.g., a left eye image and a right eye image, captured from cameras spaced apart by a distance approximating the distance between a human's left and right eye. During playback, the left eye image is supplied to the left eye and the right eye image is supplied to the right eye. Minor differences between the left and right eye are perceived and give a sense of depth.
Reflections off objects and/or other camera issues may result in undesired differences in the left and right eye images beyond the differences which allow for the perception of depth. Such undesirable differences may have negative effects on the perceived image quality of a stereoscopic image which is played back and viewed.
While some undesirable differences between left and right eye images may be due to issues relating to image capture, transmission and storage constraints may also have an impact on perceived image quality. To reduce the amount of data required to store and/or communicate images, stereoscopic images are often encoded, e.g., compressed, using lossy compression techniques. Some encoding techniques involve encoding the content of one image in a stereoscopic image pair representing a stereoscopic frame as a function of the other image in the stereoscopic frame. Large differences between the left and right eye images of an image pair representing a stereoscopic frame may render such compression techniques less effective than is desirable and/or cause undesirable coding artifacts which may be visible when viewing a stereoscopic image generated during playback from the encoded left and right eye images corresponding to a stereoscopic frame.
In view of the above discussion, it should be appreciated that it would be desirable if one or more methods and/or apparatus could be developed which could reduce or eliminate the negative effects of undesirable or excessive differences between left and right eye images of a stereoscopic frame. While methods and apparatus which could be incorporated into an encoder would be desirable it would be particularly desirable if methods of processing stereoscopic images to reduce undesirable differences could be developed which were generally encoder independent, e.g., which could be used with any of a wide variety of stereoscopic encoding techniques.